Buckle Your Seatbelts…

I'm posting this on behalf of Abby, who's internet access might be a bit flaky this week. Enjoy! - Jeremy

This week’s Lectionary Texts are Jeremiah 1:4-10, Luke 13:10-17, and Hebrews 12:18-29.

As we come to the end of what I am unofficially terming “The Summer of the Prophets,” our travels are slowing down and more of us are remaining in one place for longer stretches as we get back to our school year routines (a pattern that seems to hold true even for those of us whose lives are no longer dictated by the academic calendar as students or parents of students or teachers!). The Lectionary follows suit, whether by plan or by chance. Rather than jumping to a new prophet every couple of weeks as we have all summer (a couple weeks with Elijah, a couple with Elisha, two with Amos, two with Hosea, two with Isaiah), our next NINE Sundays of Old Testament lessons will remain with one prophet: good old Jeremiah (or young Jeremiah, when we meet him this week).

Jeremiah, we will find, can be a tough prophet to sit with for one week, let alone nine. His book is amazing, his prophecy words we need to hear; but Jeremiah’s prophecy contains words that are not always easy to hear. One of my favorite authors, Kathleen Norris, speaks well in her book The Cloister Walk of her difficulty in hearing the book of Jeremiah read continuously in its entirely over the course of several weeks of morning worship at a monastery:

“One day, not long after we’d begun to read Jeremiah, and it was dawning on us that we had a long, rough road ahead, a monk said to me he was glad to be reading Jeremiah in the morning, and not at evening prayer, when there are likely to be more guests. ‘The monks can take it,’ he said, ‘but most people have no idea what’s in the Bible, and they come unglued.’ Coming unglued came to seem the point of listening to Jeremiah. Hearing Jeremiah’s words every morning, I soon felt challenged to reflect on the upheavals in my own society, and in my life. A prophet’s task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone.” (Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk. New York: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 34)

Coming unglued…that doesn’t sound pleasant. But sometimes, it seems, the glue of our old ways, molds, plans, and perceptions needs to be loosened before a new call can unfold. Our first encounter with Jeremiah this week gives us a window into the sacred moment of call where Jeremiah’s life as he knew it began to come unglued so that God, through him, could address the needs of a world that is crumbling. Jeremiah’s life is given a new calling, a commission that will bring both judgment and hope not just to Jeremiah’s own people, but to the nations of the world.

Our Gospel and Epistle texts dovetail with this unsettling theme of coming unglued for the sake of new possibility. When Jesus heals a woman who has been bent over for 18 years, not only do the paralyzed bones of her body come unglued from their crippled state when they hear the call of Jesus’ voice, but the Temple authorities come unglued as this Rabbi issues a call that breaks all their carefully planned rules and ideas of propriety. Likewise, the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we no longer operate under the tangibles of the Old Covenant and its regulations, but in the realm of a Spirit who is creating a New Covenant in ways that are often unpredictable and untamed. As Eugene Peterson’s The Message puts the last verse of the reading, “God is not an indifferent bystander. [God’s] actively cleaning house, torching all that needs to burn, and won’t quit until it’s all cleansed. God himself is Fire!”

Friends, if we are going to spend 9 weeks not just with Jeremiah but with this sort of God, we’d best buckle our seatbelts…for who knows where such a God’s call will take us?

May peace be with you on this unsettling journey,

Abby

A Tale of Two Neighborhoods

Greetings, Broadneck Blogosphere! It's a joy to be coming alongside of you in this conversation around our worship scriptures, and a joy to gather with many of you each week as we explore God's oh-so-simple-but-so-bafflingly-complicated Word for our lives together in community. I believe that every time we authentically seek to encounter God's Word, we cannot help but be formed and transformed by it...so engage this blog with hope, yet proceed with a proper dose of holy caution:)

Our main scriptures for consideration this week are Amos 7:7-17 and Luke 10:25-37. At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more divergent passages to bring into conversation with one another. The latter, after all, is a passage--the story of the Good Samaritan--so culturally well-known that many states have laws named after it to protect the rights of those who stop to aid stranded motorists. It's one of the handful of biblical stories where even marginal churchgoers could provide you with its high points without the benefit of a text in front of them. The former, meanwhile, is an obscure episode from a prophet so unknown that his words are included in a measly 5 of the 156 weeks of the Revised Common Lectionary (and only on two occasions--this week and next!--is it the primary text rather than an "alternate"). Ask even the most fervent churchgoer to tell you something about Amos, and most would give you a blank stare. Apart from Jonah and his whale, the so-called "Minor Prophets" (the technical name for those whose writings are found between the Old Testament books of Hosea and Malachi) seem aptly named...their writings, filled with archaic language of judgment and doom, are so minor as to not merit much of our attention, in church or in culture.

So why not ditch Amos (and the cavalcade of Minor Prophets we'll encounter over the next few weeks) and just focus on Luke? Well, there are a couple of strong reasons to keep Amos' words in play.

First, this may seem obvious, but the Old Testament prophets did not just speak to societies past; their words, though set in a particular context, still ring true today, because it is the role of the prophet to direct the hearer's attention to the bigger picture. As Craig Smith and Mark Buckley explain in their intro to The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures, "prophets revive our capacity to feel and draw our attention to what we would rather not see." Prophets, with their sometimes uncomfortable rhetoric, speak to our hardened hearts and reveal our well-cultivated blind spots. Amos does this so beautifully but painfully in today's passage. The kindgom of Israel, which everyone thought was doing SO well, is in actuality a kingdom that has fallen out of step with the plumb line God intended for its design, becoming a curse to its neighbors rather than the blessing to all nations it was intended to be. Such words are painful, but the sort of truth-speaking that is needed even when it causes us to lash back like Amaziah in hopes that these are words we can ignore.

Second, I think we should hold on to Amos because his message is not as far from Luke's as it may seem. Sure, Amos speaks of judgment while Jesus tells a tale of mercy; Amos speaks in strange, almost indecipherable metaphor, while Jesus speaks of people and places with whom the inquisitive lawyer would have been intimately familiar. But in reality, Amos and Luke are both speaking of matters very close to home: matters of what it means to live by the first law given God's people, the declaration that we are to love the Lord our God and love our neighbor as ourselves. Luke and Amos, though separated by time, context, and popularity, together give us a tale of two neighborhoods--one headed for disaster because of its failure to live by God's standards of justice and faithfulness, and one for whom there is still hope if they can realize their neighborhood is far bigger than they'd ever imagined. Both are stories intended to reform, form, and transform their hearers by revealing the heart of God--a heart that seeks to see the divided people God created learn to live in fellowship with one another and their Maker.

These two tales are ones we in the church need to hear...no matter how familiar or unfamiliar they are, no matter how uncomfortable they make us. I hope you'll join us Sunday as we continue the conversation!

Peace,
Abby